Frisco's Gearbox Software expands, opens game studio in Quebec

Gearbox Software, the Frisco (formerly Plano)-based game developer best known for the Borderlands series of games is expanding. They announced today that they are opening a new studio in Quebec, Canada.

The new studio (called simply Gearbox Studio Quebec) is now hiring for development of a new "AAA" game.

Gearbox has been exclusively in Texas for more than 16 years, though they've worked with a variety of other companies around the world. One of the Borderlands games for example, The Pre-Sequel, was developed in Australia.

"We are fortunate that there is a lot of demand on us to deliver our brand of interactive entertainment within the powerful franchises we have at Gearbox Software and the challenge for us is growing to meet this demand," Gearbox Software president Randy Pitchford said in a press release. "As part of our strategy we have already successfully built an expanded all-new headquarters in Frisco. We now look ahead to another key and exciting step which is our commitment towards our all-new Gearbox Studio Quebec where we strive to team up with some incredible talent in the world of video game development outside of Texas to help us build fun and exciting video games within our tent-pole brands."

Those brands include the aforementioned Borderlands, Duke Nukem, the World War II-themed Brothers in Arms and the classic real-time strategy series Homeworld, which Gearbox bought the rights to back in 2013.

The Quebec studio will be helmed by Sebastien Caisse, Ph.D. and Pierre-Andre Dery. Dery has previously done work on games such as Skylanders, Farcry and World of Warcraft.

"Thanks to Randy and his gifted team in Texas, we are designing a truly unique studio from the ground up in order to enhance Gearbox's ability to entertain the world with best-selling, larger-than-life experiences," Caisse said. "To be able work for such a storied independent game studio as Gearbox is a great honor."

Britton Peele. Britton Peele is a Project Manager and Geek Critic (totally a real thing and not something he just made up) at The Dallas Morning News, and was formerly an editor of GuideLive. He's written about video games for a variety of places on the internet and is a firm believer in Narnia, Middle-Earth and Oceanic Flight 815.